Raising justice: Political autonomy and a decolonial feminist relandscaping of Mexico City's Reforma

Abstract

In September 2021, and in the middle Mexico City's famed boulevard, El Paseo de la Reforma, feminist and decolonial activists use ropes and ladders to ascend a stone plinth. They haul up a wooden carving of a girlish figure who thrusts her fist skyward and is painted completely in violet. They call her their “antimonument,” name her “Justicia” (Justice), and replace a massive memorial of Christopher Columbus and four Catholic friars that for over a century had represented the “glory” of Mexico's “European Discovery” within what had been known as, “The Roundabout of Columbus.” Today, Justicia stands in this same place that is now celebrated as: “The Roundabout to Women Who Fight.” As one of many antimonuments that commands attention along the country's most revered boulevard, where dozens of men known for their colonialist, slave-owning, and patriarchal sentiments have represented Mexico's national story, Justicia stands as a materialization of the embodied decolonial feminist activism that is transforming governance within Mexico and in many places across the southern Americas. In this essay, we contextualize the raising of Justicia on the Reforma within a broader discussion of the interconnected and subversive embodiments of feminist and decolonial coalitions that are remaking Mexico's commemorative spaces, both within the public imaginary as well as in the experience of tangible places. We refer to this radical remaking as “relandscaping,” a concept that we place in dialogue with feminist and decolonial geographies and feminist landscape studies. With this theoretical framing, we explore relandscaping as an example of what Cindi Katz intends with the idea of counter-topography, as solidarity that emerges at the interstices of the material and symbolic and across the interconnected scales of embodied activism. By putting together this feminist and decolonial toolkit, we show that autonomy is not merely a political act but also a landscape practice with promise for the making of innovative counter-topographies against the racist and misogynist terror within modernity's colonialist legacies.